Quote of the Day: Change is the Core for Great Civilization

Wait!

It’s NOT the kind of pernicious “CHANGE” peddled or promoted by politicians and their political zombie followers seen in media or in mainstream institutions where (emotionally packaged) ‘change’ for them means that people need to think more collectively and become conformists which implies the surrender civil and individual freedoms to become tacit ‘serfs’ in ‘service for society’ (society here is a euphemism for political overlords).

Instead, the changes which makes society prosper is when people are allowed to think and act DYNAMICALLY—where danger, failure and losses are seen as virtues rather than a curse, as these represent crucial elements for discovery, learning and importantly creative destruction, all of which adds to the betterment of civilization.

Jeffrey Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books in magnificently expounds on these…

The impulse to create environments that are hyper-cushioned and protected does not prepare anyone for effective functioning in real life. That’s because this type of environment has nothing to do with the real world. No matter how much we regulate, manage, create safety nets and otherwise build systems that remove obvious dangers from the word, the structure of the universe guarantees that the future is always unknown. Uncertainty does exist and cannot be eradicated. Change happens, and we have to be prepared to adapt to it. Nothing that happened in the past can necessarily be repeated in a changed future.

This is especially true in the economic environment. In a growing and developing economy, there is no stasis. Nothing is the exactly the same one day to the next day. There are constant changes in prices, resource availabilities, consumer tastes, worker availability and, especially, in technology. If a system cannot accommodate these, it is useless.

In a growing economy, there are profits and losses, success stories and bankruptcies, amazing triumphs and terrible losses and, most of all, there are surprises around every corner. Every day is an opportunity for something newer and better.

The government talks of stabilization, but there is no stability in a developing economy. Change, change and more change is the central character. Institutions rise and then must be torn down and replaced by new institutions.

This is the core of what builds a great civilization. It is not safety and stability but open-endedness, the opportunity for discovery and reinvention — that is the driving force of social and economic development. This also happens to be the very thing that bureaucracies and regulations oppose. They shut opportunity and constrain innovation. They tend to want to preserve what is outmoded and put fetters on what is emerging.

But here is the irony: If we think of history as the competition between controlled safety under despotic rulers and open-ended uncertainty under freedom, societies that embrace freedom win out every time. Freedom leads to growth and long-run triumph.

The above should apply not only to commerce but to all aspects including regulations as well.

Read the rest here